Not this Lazyllama

Just to let anyone know who might be looking, I’m not the lazy-llama that sold but didn’t deliver festival tickets. I’m in Thailand at the moment, and my ebay account hasn’t been used for over a year (and it isn’t “lazy-llama” anyway).

I only found out that someone was using the similar name when my host got a text message asking for my details (!) and through looking at my web referrer logs.

More info about the other “‘lazy-llama’ is here

Catching Up

Finally got down to work and uploaded some more pictures.

Here’s the silverwork that Vic and I created in Ubud, Bali last month. Vic made the nice rectangular pendant, and I made the rough-and-ready round thing.

Silver from Ubud

I’ve also upload some pictures from Koh Phangan where we’ve been staying for the past month.

On Sunday we went along to the Full Moon Party on Sunrise Beach and enjoyed ourselves. We had a few beers and a bottle of wine and enjoyed the atmosphere. We took some photos but most of them turned out a bit blurry, but that’s to be expected in crowds at night with a compact digi-cam. They still give a feeling for the atmosphere.

Full Moon Party, Koh Phangan, 9/2005

The party was threatened with a powercut and the whole island had major power problems for 3-4 days beforehand, with no power at all for several hours at a time. The problem was that one of the two underwater power cables to the island needed repairing. Not sure why they decided to do it around the Full Moon Party when the island is full of visitors and needs more power than normal, but it could have something to do with a government minister trying to get the parties shutdown as they are a bad example to young Thai’s. The minister in question has obviously never ventured down Patpong in Bangkok where “pussy shows” are openly offered.

As it turned out, there was power for the party, and an early evening shower cleared so that everything went ahead just fine.

It rained heavily the next morning, and the power went again but most people were asleep so didn’t mind too much.

We’re off to Bangkok later tonight to meet up with our friend Cedric who is there for a week. After that it’s onward to Singapore and then Brisbane. So I should have a bit more to tell you all ;)

Haven’t we been here before?

Sorry for the lack of updates, I’ve been terribly slack about posting for the past 3 or 4 weeks.

After we left Bali we were in Kuala Lumpur for a few days, mostly getting a Thai visa sorted out as we want to stay in Thailand for more than 30 days. We put in our application on the Friday morning and picked up the visas on Monday at 11:30am.

While in KL we were both quite sick with the coughs that had affected us in Bali. On the Sunday we were so tired and ill that we didn’t go out.

On the Monday we went to a different shopping centre, Berjaya Times Square, a new centre which hasn’t all opened yet.

One part of the centre has 6 or so floors given over to a theme park with a big indoor rollercoaster, complete with loops. Although tempted, Vic wasn’t well enough for us to go on it, but she’s promised that we can go to one of the theme parks near Brisbane when we get there.

There was also a Borders bookshop in the centre where we picked up some more reading material, and a watch shop where I bought a cheaper replacement for my Seiko Arctura Kinetic because the strap had perished (after less than 18 months) and it isn’t possible to get it replaced without sending the watch back to Seiko, which takes about a month.

KL is great if you like shopping centres, but doesn’t really have much else going for it as far as we could see.

After that it was a flight back to Bangkok with Air Asia. Once more they let us down and delayed the flight by several hours meaning that we missed our connection to Koh Samui. The actual flight to Bangkok was fine, and the views from the window as we flew overthe coast of Thailand were very spectacular, giving great views of rice fields and towns.

View of Thai coast from air

Fortunately, BangkokAir were very good and let us change our flight to the next day when we called them to let them know. That meant we had half a day in Bangkok, so we stayed at Samran Place again and visited the Emporium mall for some dinner.

The next morning it was back to the airport and on to Koh Samui, then a taxi to the ferry point at Big Buddha and the ferry to Koh Phangan, arriving at Sarikantang at around 3pm.

So that’s us, back on Koh Phangan, staying at Sarikantang on Leela Beach near Haad Rin again. We’ve joined the gym again and are going regularly. That’s probably also helped us get over the coughs which are completely gone now.

Leela Beach, Koh Phangan at sunset

We’re here for another couple of weeks and then it’s time to move on; we’ll be in Australia by the 30th September!